Friday, March 29, 2013

North Korea says it has entered 'a state of war' with South Korea in the latest of a string of threats that have raised tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

A statement Saturday by Pyongyang said all matters between the sides will be dealt with in a manner befitting war.

Earlier this week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his troops to be on a high alert in response to annual U.S-South Korean drills. He warned his forces were ready "to settle accounts with the U.S." after two American B-2 bombers flew a training mission in South Korea.

Big depositors in Cyprus's largest bank stand to lose far more than initially feared under a European Union rescue package to save the island from bankruptcy, a source with direct knowledge of the terms said on Friday.

Under conditions expected to be announced on Saturday, depositors in Bank of Cyprus will get shares in the bank worth 37.5 percent of their deposits over 100,000 euros, the source told Reuters, while the rest of their deposits may never be paid back.

The toughening of the terms will send a clear signal that the bailout means the end of Cyprus as a hub for offshore finance and could accelerate economic decline on the island and bring steeper job losses.

A Newport News teacher whose students have been charged with trying to poison her says she had no idea they were putting hand sanitizer in her tea.

Jane Miller, a teacher at Hines Middle School in Newport News, says she began to feel sick at the beginning of the school year.

"What it was, was my stomach would bother me. I was running a low-grade temperature. I was just exhausted by the time I got home. And putting it all together, the Germ X I was using was 60% alcohol, which equates to 130 proof, and I don't drink that much," said Miller.

Pam Madigan walked deliberately among the Golden Gate Park Concourse’s grove of knotted old trees as if searching for a pot of gold -- ignoring the attractions of the nearby DeYoung Museum and Academy of Sciences.

With her infant son cradled in her arms, her eyes darted to the base of a particular elm where a tiny wooden door covered a large knot hole. She summoned her group of friends and children, pointing to the tiny door which was not more than a foot tall.

“It was sort of an idea to have a scavenger hunt and go out and look for it,” Madigan said. “It’s not on a map.”

Florida legislators considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion were shocked during a committee hearing this week when a Planned Parenthood official endorsed a right to post-birth abortion.

Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor.

"So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief," said Rep. Jim Boyd. "If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

Most important comment left on youtube page:
"If it's OK to kill a newborn baby 1 second after it is born, then it would be﻿ OK to kill a newborn 2 second after birth. And if its OK to kill a baby 2 seconds after birth, then what's wrong with 1 minute? 2 Minutes? An hour? A day? A year? 20 years? See where this goes?"

The Muslims of Sit Kwin were always a small group who numbered no more than 100 of the village's 2,000 people. But as sectarian violence led by Buddhist mobs spreads across central Myanmar, they and many other Muslims are disappearing.

Their homes, shops and mosques destroyed, some end up in refugee camps or hide in the homes of friends or relatives. Dozens have been killed.

"We don't know where they are," says Aung Ko Myint, 24, a taxi-driver in Sit Kwin, where on Friday, Buddhists ransacked a store owned by one of the town's last remaining Muslims. "He escaped this morning just before the mob got here."

At least two British women travelling in an aid convoy have been raped after being kidnapped in Benghazi, according to reports.

Libyan authorities said two women, who are originally from Pakistan, were travelling with two men on their way to the airport when they were snatched, reportedly by pro-government militiamen. Other reports said three women had been attacked.

The Deputy Prime Minister, Awad al Barassi, has visited the women in hospital and said that they were in "very bad shape" following the ordeal on Tuesday.

“The eyes of Texas are upon you” goes the song, but right now those eyes seem to be squarely focused on the financial crisis in Cyprus.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is supporting a bill that would return the state’s $1 billion in gold reserves currently stored by the Federal Reserve at a vault in New York to the state.

The sponsor of the bill, State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, told the Texas Tribune, “For us to have our own gold, a lot of the runs on the bank and those types of things, they happen because people are worried that there’s nothing there to back it up.”

Bank runs were the great fear in the Mediterranean-island country of Cyprus today, as banks reopened for the first time since March 16, while the European Union imposed unprecedented austerity measures on the nation, including confiscating money in bank accounts. WND reported on March 18 the concerns that the crisis could spread to the U.S. financial system.

European Central Bank Governing Council member Klaas Knot said on Friday there was "little wrong" with Eurogroup chair Jeroen Dijsselbloem's recipe for dealing with future euro zone banking crises, a newspaper reported.

Dijsselbloem, the head of the euro zone's finance ministers and like Knot a Dutchman, said on Monday the rescue program agreed for Cyprus - the first to impose a levy on bank deposits - would serve as a model for future crises.

Those comments - which Dijsselbloem later rowed back on -prompted a market selloff and led two other ECB policymakers, including executive board member Benoit Coeure, to say on Tuesday that Cyprus was a unique case.

But Knot, who sits on the bank's main decision-making body, said: "There is little wrong with Dijsselbloem's remarks.

"The content of his remarks comes down to an approach which has been on the table for a longer time in Europe. This approach will be part of the European liquidation policy."

A warlord has been jailed for 45 years for the murder, rape and torture of non-Serb civilians in Sarajevo in the Bosnian war.

Veselin Vlahovic, a Montenegrin nicknamed Batko, receiving the longest sentence handed down so far by the Bosnian war crimes court.

He was found guilty of the murders of 31 people, rapes of at least 13 women and torture and robbery of dozens of civilians in Grbavica and Vraca, Serb-occupied areas of Sarajevo, in 1992, said presiding judge Zoran Bozic.

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi insisted on Friday the only way out of Italy's political deadlock was for his center-left rivals to accept a coalition deal that would give him a share in power.

Berlusconi met President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday after center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani failed to end a month-old stalemate since an election last month that has fuelled worries about the stability of the euro zone's third largest economy.

A quarter of firms that are members of a leading U.S. business lobby in China have been victims of data theft, a report by the group said on Friday, amid growing vitriol between Beijing and Washington over the threat of cyber attacks.

Twenty-six percent of members who responded to an annual survey said their proprietary data or trade secrets had been compromised or stolen from their China operations, the American Chamber of Commerce in China report said.

Michael Steinberg, a portfolio manager at Steve Cohen's $15 billion SAC Capital Advisors, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at his home in New York City early Friday morning in connection with a long-running insider trading investigation of the hedge fund, a FBI spokesman said.

Federal prosecutors had been considering indicting Steinberg on charges that he traded on inside information on Dell Inc (DELL.O) stock, sources close to the matter said on Thursday.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for a blast that killed 10 people near the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar on Friday.

A suicide bomber rode a motorbike up to a security checkpoint a third of a mile from the consulate and detonated 22 pounds of explosives attached to his body, police spokesman Mohammad Faisal said. Along with those killed, the strike also injured 31 others, Pakistani military officials said.

Violent attacks occur frequently around Peshawar, which is in Pakistan's northwest near the border with Afghanistan and adjacent to Pakistan's tribal region.

The 75% super-tax on the mega-rich, which was rejected by France's constitutional court might be imposed anyway. French President Francois Hollande suggests laying the burden on businesses rather than on individuals.

In the interview with France 2 television President Hollande said he has revised his original plan to lay the massive tax on individuals earning above €1 million, which has been ruled “unfair” and rejected by the Constitutional Court and later the State Councils, leaving the President embarrassed.

France’s top administrative court ruled that any tax rate above 66% was likely to be rejected again by the Constitutional Council, the Finance Ministry said last week.

The headlines have been apocalyptic: "Global internet slows after biggest attack in history"; "Biggest ever cyberattack slows internet for millions"; "The attack that nearly broke the internet"; "Cyber attack jams crucial infrastructure around the world".

So how was it for you?

According to a company called CloudFlare, which specialises in helping websites minimise the impact of online junk data attacks by effectively creating more targets and thus spreading the burden between them, this particular assault – by a Dutch hosting company, Cyberbunker, on a not-for-profit anti-spam organisation called Spamhaus – eventually escalated to cause "congestion across several major [top-level, backbone internet networks], primarily in Europe, that would have affected hundreds of millions of people ... "

Hence, presumably, the armageddon headlines. Except, as the tech website Gizmodo points out, not many people seem to have noticed

Gizmodo concludes the whole story was essentially a cynical bid by CloudFlare to drum up more business.

The euro hovered near a four-month lows on worries that losses suffered by Cypriot depositors may unnerve investors in other euro zone debt and on Italian political woes, but market participants also said the single currency seems to have found a bottom for now.

Trade was, however, subdued with many markets closed for Easter holidays, and there was limited reaction to North Korea putting its missile units on standby to attack U.S. military bases in South Korea and the Pacific.

The president of Cyprus said on Friday the risk of bankruptcy had been contained and the country had no intention of leaving the euro, in a speech laden with criticism of Europe's currency union for "experimenting" with the island's fate.

Conservative leader Nicos Anastasiades spoke a day after banks reopened following an almost two-week shutdown to avert a run on deposits by worried Cypriots and wealthy foreign depositors as the country raced to clinch a rescue package from the European Union.

An American army veteran has been charged in the US for fighting alongside a Syrian rebel group linked to al Qaeda.

Eric Harroun boasted on Facebook and posted videos of his military adventures with Jabhat al Nusrah, which is designated as a terrorist group by the US.

But he is now facing charges of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction outside the US, specifically firing rocket-propelled grenades as part of an attack against the government of President Bashar al Assad.

Mark Miscavish opened fire on his estranged wife, Traci Miscavish, around 10am Thursday at the Country Market in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania before killing himself in the grocery store, police said. The woman, Traci A. Miscavish, 49, had only days ago filed for divorce against her husband, a 15-year veteran of the state police force.

A New York City doctor has been charged with running an interstate smuggling ring that trafficked $10 million worth of oxycodone across several states, including the New York metropolitan area and Pennsylvania.

Authorities said 49 people were arrested on Tuesday, including the leaders of two major drug trafficking networks in Pennsylvania, after an undercover 15-month investigation conducted by the city's special narcotics unit.

Dr. Hector Castro, who ran the Itzamna Medical Center in Manhattan, has pleaded not guilty to 39 counts of criminal sale of a prescription for a controlled substance in Manhattan's state Supreme Court.

The Obama administration is arguing in federal court that a homeschooling family from Germany should be deported back to their homeland, despite what they say is religious persecution. The German government prevented Uwe and Hannelore Romeike from teaching their five children at home instead of sending them to government-run schools, fining them and threatening to prosecute them if they don't obey.

When they took their three oldest children out of school in 2006, police showed up at their house within 24 hours, only leaving after a group of supporters showed up and organized a quick protest.

But their legal troubles were just beginning. Germany began fining the family, ultimately racking up a bill of more than 7,000 Euros ($9,000).

After they fled to the United States in 2010, the Romeike family initially were granted political asylum and found a home in Tennessee. They had a sixth child. But then U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appealed the asylum decision in 2012.